The notion that the Civil Rights Movement in the Southern United States was a nonviolent movement remains a dominate theme of Civil Rights memory and representation in popular culture. Yet in dozens of Southern communities, Black people picked up arms to defend their leaders, communities, and lives. In particular, Black people relied on armed self-defense in communities where federal government officials failed to safeguard activists and supporters from the violence of racists and segregationists, who were often supported by local law enforcement.
In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the Southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Armed self–defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black Southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of white supremacist terror. By 1965, armed resistance, particularly self–defense was a significant factor in the challenge of the descendants of enslaved Africans to overturn fear and intimidation and develop different political and social relationships between Black and white Mississippians.
This riveting historical narrative relies upon oral history, archival material, and scholarly literature to reconstruct the use of armed resistance by Black activists and their supporters in Mississippi to challenge racist terrorism and segregation and to fight for human rights and political empowerment from the early 1950’s through the late 1970s.
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